


But if I Start to Levitate (Pull Me Down with All Your Weight)

by SylphOfPaperPlanes



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Character Study, Developing Relationship, Eventual Happy Ending, Fix-It, Ghost Drifting, I just want Happy Gay Scientists is that too much to ask for, M/M, Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) Compliant, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 14:23:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14166798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylphOfPaperPlanes/pseuds/SylphOfPaperPlanes
Summary: Hermann wants to say something, anything, when Newton’s eyes snap open, pupils dilating the second they land on him with a stark look ofconfusion-fear-recognition-dear-god-help-methat hits with the lucidity. He sits up as far as the restraints around his arms and chest will let him, hands shaking. Hermann can feel the disorientation radiating off him, pain and guilt and words he hasn’t said, words that need to be spoken—“How adorable,” a voice other than Newt’s says from his mouth, dripping in smug malice. His head tilts imperceptibly, “He cares.”---An exploration into the messy, unpredictable relationship between Newt and Hermann in the wake of the events of Uprising, and everything that entails.(Because, of course, you can't simply cancel the apocalypse a second time around and not expect consequences.)





	But if I Start to Levitate (Pull Me Down with All Your Weight)

**Author's Note:**

> I am a huge fan of the first Pacific Rim movie and I have... lot of feelings about the second. My first thought after seeing it was "Well we just have to fix everything now, don't we?" 
> 
> This is a fix-it in the regard that it will try and reconcile the characters we know from the first movie and their depictions in the second. Additionally, it's going to fill in some of the plot holes/inconsistencies that I felt needed a bit of attention. Enjoy!
> 
> (Title from Death Cab For Cutie's "Good Help Is So Hard to Find")

Hermann can’t bring himself to visit Newt at all for the first three weeks.

(This is the lie he will tell everyone in the aftermath of it all. It’s a nuanced and complicated matter, and the illusion of distance works as a means of staving off accusations of collusion. Or something. At least, that’s the reason he tells himself.)

In reality, when Newt arrives at the Shatterdome, unconscious and handcuffed to a hospital bed, Hermann can’t bring himself to leave his side for two days.

He sits there with mission reports in hand, pretending to read while doctors move wordlessly around the room, taking readings and running scans. He could do it all himself, he thinks, able to hear the barest echo of Dr. Geiszler’s heartbeat from somewhere through the drift. He knows when he draws close to the surface but can’t quite break it, like the ghost of a breath fogging the opposite side of a window, but sits back and lets the specialists work. If anyone takes note of how he watches every motion like a hawk, they don’t speak a word of it.

The hard plastic chairs of the medical bay don’t agree with his hip, but he supposes nothing does anymore. He takes a painkiller and focuses on Newton’s labored, sometimes fitful breathing from underneath IVs and electrodes and restraints. His tattoos seem so strange against the pale sheets, a sick irony of kaiju above and below his skin. Hermann watches Newt’s eyes flicker back and forth beneath the lids, and he’s hit with the memory of how Newton’s eyes moved, vibrant and wide over a specimen so many years ago.

It’s nineteen hundred hours on the second day when he feels a long-familiar tug at his consciousness. His fingers grip his cane tightly as Newton’s eyelids flutter, his breathing falls irregular, and his limbs shift in the stiff disarray of awakening.

He wants to say something, anything, when Newton’s eyes snap open, pupils dilating the second they land on him with a stark look of _confusion-fear-recognition-dear-god-help-me_ that hits with the lucidity. He sits up as far as the restraints around his arms and chest will let him, hands shaking. Hermann can feel the disorientation radiating off him, pain and guilt and words he hasn’t said, words that need to be said—

Just as suddenly, something harsh and steely crashes on the edge of the drift, sharp and foreign as Newton’s eyes cloud over, pupils shrinking to pinpricks and a smirk pulling at the corners of his lips. His head tilts, eyes narrow, suddenly too still. Hermann’s frozen too, his hip is _screaming_ from how he’s bent ever so forward, how he’s tensed every single muscle in his body. More importantly, his heart aches beyond all aches, the single second of clarity-fear in Newt’s eyes replaying over and over in his mind at a sickening speed.

“How adorable,” a voice other than Newt’s says from his mouth, dripping in smug malice. His head tilts imperceptibly, “He cares.”

Newt’s body goes limp and the EKG returns to its rhythmic beeping.

Hermann stands with shaky hesitancy and walks past a growing crowd of doctors with the same. His fingers are numb and bone-white where they’re gripping his cane, but when the medical bay doors hiss shut behind him, he doesn’t doesn’t look back.

 

* * *

 

By the time the rest of the staff—his assistants included, apparently—are coming-to in their dormitories with post-celebratory hangovers in the wake of a long weekend of revelry, Hermann is already well into his work and research.  
(This, he finds relief in saying, is true. There’s a verifiable plethora of new samples to study, new data to compare, schema to update; the list is endless enough that he’d probably work through the next inevitable breach event, with the way things seem to be going.

And anyway, he’s never been one to drown his sorrows. Or celebrations.)

Getting acquainted with Newton’s memories through the drift had been a brilliant boon to the PPDC, Hermann thinks to himself as he removes a vial of neutralized Kaiju cerebrospinal fluid from the centrifuge and holds it up to the light. It’s almost second nature to note the ratios between separated layers of vivid blue plasma and all the other chemicals that are suspended in the glass with a practiced ease. When the PPDC lost their best and brightest alien biologist to the private sector’s promises and paychecks, Hermann had been able to step in for the last few nuanced issues needed in the wake of peace. The last few samples not donated to museums or hawked to private collectors needed tending to, and Hermann could at least pull from Newt’s lifetime of research.

(It doesn’t matter that the Marshal had offered to hire a replacement, and it most certainly doesn’t matter that Hermann had refused. He didn’t like to think about how empty their old laboratory space had been without Newt, but he liked to think even less about what it would have been like with someone else in it.)

Now though, he’s standing in his gleaming new lab rather than a rusted over basement, with holoprojectors instead of chalkboards, spotless windows overlooking the water instead of pockmarked steel walls. He had indulged somewhat, set up the kitchy kaiju action figures Newt had bought him for his birthday as a joke so many years ago, let clutter and notes gather on tables, leave experiments out instead of carefully filing them away. He paid his dues in cleanliness, having to watch after Newt so he supposes he deserves this, after all this time. He worked hard enough to merit a reprieve; over the past ten years, he’d found a neutralizing base for the acidic component that triggered the Kaiju Blue phenomenon, streamlined the drift interface, anything that could and would be found useful. Even after the battles first ended, the war couldn’t be won until every scrap of the Pacific could return to the life they used to live. In one of his sparse letters, written in his strange, angular handwriting, Newt had called him an idiot for beating a dead horse years after the breach had closed.

Well, Hermann thinks, look where that had gotten him.

At the back of his mind Hermann feels the faintest flicker, imperceptible as moth’s wings over his skin, from across the building and he knows Newt is struggling to break into consciousness again. Some part of him is already moving toward the door, to him, the _real_ him, not the one that’s been smothered past recognition by the precursors because he’s _there_ and he knows this and—

A tidal wave crashes over him and for a split second he’s seeing through Newt’s eyes, pulling against the restraints, faces looking down on him, the other side of the Breach, then— Nothing.

Distantly, Hermann hears the vial shatter, feels his hand close around empty air, but he’s still reeling from the sudden, unexpected sensory feedback. He’s sick to his stomach and his ears are ringing with the ghost-drift, and all he can do is put his weight on his cane, ground himself in any way he can while the room slowly stops spinning and he can feel his feet beneath him rather than the rasp of hospital sheets.

When his vision returns to him and he sees the mess of glass and bioluminescent plasma over the counter in front of him, he curses a blue streak, rummaging through drawers for a rag to wipe it down with. That’d been the last target-topped tube they’d had on hand, and he’d needed all they could get.

It’d been hours of this disruption, the strange fluttering flow of the drift as Newt hovers on the edge of consciousness, each time seeming more coherent before the Precursors take over. (It’s been years since he’s felt the ghost-drift this strong, and he supposes it’s partially proximity, partially whatever is happening in Newt’s mind. With as much research that had existed between the two of them, he knew the human brain could work unpredictably—erratically, even—to even mild traumas, much less that of a decade’s worth of manipulation by extra-dimensional beings.)

Hermann works methodically until the counter is clean and the shards of glass are in the proper receptacle, mind still somewhere else entirely. He’s half on edge, half waiting for another wave of consciousness to move through the drift, waiting for a sign to go back to the med bay and see the person that he once knew, not some breach-addled monster.

He’s still for a long moment, the hum of the drift fading behind the roar in his ears, blending into the motionless air of the lab. He can’t focus on this, he knows. There’s work that must be done, samples to be tested and retested, humanity to to protect. He can’t pause to let emotions pour into things; his nightmares had been devastating to progress and he couldn’t let this be more of the same.

The only answer to a setback is to push forward and fight against the currents, against the uncertainty, the hopelessness, to hold faith in the truth, the last vestiges of hope that the apocalypse will continue to face cancellation time and time again. There will be a day without threat, Hermann thinks, a day without the suffering surrounding the Pacific, a day without one eye kept on the breach.

But first, before any world can be saved again, before any nightmare-scenario can be staved off, he needs to find more test tubes.

He placed an order weeks ago, but that was before the whole world went to Hell in a handbasket for the second time around, and the PPDC’s current first, second, or third priorities are likely not serum separation tubes.

He has the vaguest memory of packing away a case of vials in the weeks after the first breach closed, in the blessed grace period where everyone in the PPDC felt ecstatic and immortal, making promises to each other that couldn’t be kept. Between the two of them, there’d been talks of new, shared laboratory space, co-authored papers, a hundred thousand things passed back and forth across the thin reverberations of the drift. In that moment, it didn’t matter that they were thinking of separate futures while they packed away their past into moving boxes.

Hermann glances over to the last few unopened boxes, left beside his desk ages ago. There’s a reason he’s let them collect their thin layer of dust, because they’d been relics rather than anything useful. It’d always felt like the wrong time to try and unpack the past, an inappropriate moment to approach something that had been left far behind.

To hesitate is to let the fear win, the part of him that is apparently waxing poetic today thinks, and with that he pulls back the lid from the topmost box—the one with _stuff from my desk_  hastily scribbled in Newt’s handwriting on the side—in a flurry of dust.

The first thing he notices, of course, are the neat rows of bubble-wrapped vials perched atop stacks of now-outdated scientific journals and books. But, as he’s lifting the set from the box and sitting it down on the counter, he sees a familiar shape wedged between one of the books and the cardboard.

“That absolute, bloody idiot,” he says to no one in particular as he fishes what he recognizes as Newton’s old phone—with its half-cracked screen and headphones still wrapped around it—out of the box. The man was always losing one phone after another through their tenure together. This had been the fourth, he remembers, and it had only been when all the boxes had been safely loaded away for transport that the imbecile had patted down his pockets in a panic and resigned himself to requesting yet another from Information Tech.

His finger hovers over the power button; some sense of nostalgia tugs at him from where he’s firmly seated in the camp of letting the past lie. The moment to revisit and reconcile came and went long ago, but something about thinking that presses at his chest in a way that makes his heart _ache_ like it did watching the light and fear drain from Newt’s eyes, and suddenly he’s watching the screen light up in front of him.

(Look how far he’s come, Hermann supposes bitterly, from relegating Newt’s belonging to the other side of a painted line in their laboratory to perusing through both his memories and his personal information on his phone long after it was too late.)

It’s muscle memory from an action he’s never taken, typing in the passcode the second the phone boots up, hitting the small icon for the music app in the bottom right corner of the screen. Newton worshiped his music, listened to it on full blast every waking moment in the lab to the point that the tinny notes that bled out of his headphones drove Hermann halfway to insanity.

It’s strange to see it now, a neat list of playlists, almost all given simple, descriptive names like _Work_ , _Sleep_ , _Disco_ ,  _Research_ , or _For Tattoo Sessions_.

The most recent one, however, created the day after the Breach closed, is titled almost hesitantly.

 _Whatever Comes After Saving the World_.

There’s a pit in Hermann’s stomach. He knows what happens. He knows what happens two times over, knows what happens to the hopeful Newton Geiszler, eye still bloodshot and hands still shaky with adrenaline and excitement. He wanted to be his blasted notion of a rockstar, spend his seconds in the spotlight that he deserved, get the recognition that he’d scraped for. And he did. Then what?

When Hermann puts in the headphones and presses play, for the briefest instant, he’s back in the rusted over lab stacked with boxes, back in a moment that was lost long ago. Without thinking, he sinks to sit on the cool tile of the floor, lets his head lean against the edge of the countertop. The songs are familiar to a part of him that isn’t his own, soothing to a person that may not even exist anymore. God, the number the past few years have done on him, getting emotional over a playlist made almost a decade ago.

He doesn’t cry, but it’s a near thing, closing his eyes as the first song ends. There’s a warm weight at the back of his mind, comforting and vague, and he leans into it like it was someone there to share the burden with.

(This might be the lie he tells himself. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if he _wants_  to know.)

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone is interested, I made the playlist to go along with this fic, [Whatever Comes After Saving the World](https://open.spotify.com/user/magnoliastorm11/playlist/6f6DlTagr6JlfWPPzZ4TMc?si=kQl8fmrtSfevK7wzxgfW-g) on Spotify! It's a big ol' jumble of genres but I feel like that's really in the vein of Newt's character, anyway.
> 
> I really appreciate any and all kudos or feedback you have to offer! I have a rough outline of how this fic is going to go, but I'm beyond interested to hear if you have any ideas or suggestions.


End file.
